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Considering a number of factors such as cross-linguistic influences, saliency and detectability of language cues, language complexity, and the interfaces involved, this book provides a systematic and coherent study of non-native grammars of Chinese. It covers a broad range of language aspects of Chinese as a non-native language, such as syntax, semantics, discourse, and pragmatics, as well as language phenomena specific to Chinese, such as classifiers, sentence final particles, the topic structure, and the ba-construction. It explores the effect on the linguistic structure of Chinese, when it is spoken as a second language by first-language speakers of English, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Spanish, Swedish, Russian and Palestinian Arabic, enabling the reader to understand the learners' mental representations of the underlying systems of the target language. New points of departure are also recommended for further research, making it essential reading for both Chinese language teaching practitioners, and academic researchers of non-native language acquisition.
List of contents
Preface; List of abbreviations; 1. Introduction; 2. L2 Chinese nominal phrases; 3. Aspectual, verbal and argument structures in L2 Chinese; 4. Passives, BA-constructions and relative clauses in L2 Chinese; 5. Topic structures, phonetically (Un)realised subjects/objects and ellipsis in L2 Chinese; 6. Reflexives in L2 Chinese grammars; 7. L2 Acquisition of Chinese Wh-words; 8. Sentence-final particles in L2 and L3 Mandarin grammars; References; Index.
About the author
Boping Yuan is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Professor Emeritus of Chinese Language and Linguistics, University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Churchill College, University of Cambridge. He is the Editor-in-chief of Journal of Second Language Studies.
